"MY SHADOW LIES UPON YOU"
I suppose I did not awake very readily. Following the nervous
vigilance of the past six months, my tired nerves, in the enjoyment of
this relaxation, were rapidly recuperating. I no longer feared to
awaken to find a knife at my throat, no longer dreaded the darkness as
a foe.
So that the voice may have been calling (indeed, _had_ been calling)
for some time, and of this I had been hazily conscious before finally
I awoke. Then, ere the new sense of security came to reassure me, the
old sense of impending harm set my heart leaping nervously. There is
always a certain physical panic attendant upon such awakenings in the
still of night, especially in novel surroundings. Now I sat up
abruptly, clutching at the rail of my berth and listening.
There was a soft thudding on my cabin door, and a voice, low and
urgent, was crying my name.
Through the port-hole the moonlight streamed into my room, and save
for a remote and soothing throb, inseparable from the progress of a
great steamship, nothing else disturbed the stillness; I might have
floated lonely upon the bosom of the Mediterranean. But there was the
drumming on the door again, and the urgent appeal:
"Dr. Petrie! Dr. Petrie!"
I threw off the bedclothes and stepped on to the floor of the cabin,
fumbling hastily for my slippers. A fear that something was amiss,
that some aftermath, some wraith of the dread Chinaman, was yet to
come to disturb our premature peace, began to haunt me. I threw open
the door.
Upon the gleaming deck, blackly outlined against a wondrous sky,
stood a man who wore a blue greatcoat over his pyjamas, and whose
unstockinged feet were thrust into red slippers. It was Platts, the
Marconi operator.
"I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, Dr. Petrie," he said, "and I was
even less anxious to arouse your neighbour; but somebody seems to be
trying to get a message, presumably urgent, through to you."
"To me!" I cried.
"I cannot make it out," admitted Platts, running his fingers through
dishevelled hair, "but I thought it better to arouse you. Will you
come up?"
I turned without a word, slipped into my dressing-gown, and with
Platts passed aft along the deserted deck. The sea was as calm as a
great lake. Ahead, on the port bow, an angry flambeau burnt redly
beneath the peaceful vault of the heavens. Platts nodded absently in
the direction of the weird flames.
"Stromboli," he said; "we shall be nearly through the Straits by
breakfast-time."
We mounted the narrow stair to the Marconi deck. At the table sat
Platts' assistant with the Marconi attachment upon his head--an
apparatus which always set me thinking of the electric chair.
"Have you got it?" demanded my companion as we entered the room.
"It's still coming through," replied the other without moving, "but in
the same jerky fashion. Every time I get it, it seems to have gone
back to the beginning--just _Dr. Petrie_--_Dr. Petrie_."
He began to listen again for the elusive message. I turned to Platts.
"Where is it being sent from?" I asked.
Platts shook his head.
"That's the mystery," he declared. "Look!"--he pointed to the table;
"according to the Marconi chart, there's a Messageries boat due west
between us and Marseilles, and the homeward-bound P. & O. which we
passed this morning must be getting on that way also, by now. The
_Isis_ is somewhere ahead, but I've spoken all these, and the message
comes from none of them."
"Then it may come from Messina."
"It doesn't come from Messina," replied the man at the table,
beginning to write rapidly.
Platts stepped forward and bent over the message which the other was
writing.
"Here it is!" he cried excitedly; "we're getting it."
Stepping in turn to the table, I leant over between the two and read
these words as the operator wrote them down: _Dr. Petrie_--_my
shadow_....
I drew a quick breath and gripped Platt's shoulder harshly. His
assistant began fingering the instrument with irritation.
"Lost it again!" he muttered.
"This message...." I began.
But again the pencil was travelling over the paper:--_lies upon you
all_ ... _end of message_.
The operator stood up and unclasped the receivers from his ears.
There, high above the sleeping ship's company, with the blue carpet of
the Mediterranean stretched indefinitely about us, we three stood
looking at one another. By virtue of a miracle of modern science, some
one, divided from me by mile upon mile of boundless ocean, had
spoken--and had been heard.
"Is there no means of learning," I said, "from whence this message
emanated?"
Platts shook his head, perplexedly.
"They gave no code word," he said. "God knows who they were. It's a
strange business and a strange message. Have you any sort of idea, Dr.
Petrie, respecting the identity of the sender?"
I stared him hard in the face; an idea had mechanically entered my
mind, but one of which I did not choose to speak, since it was opposed
to human possibility.
But had I not seen with my own eyes the bloody streak across his
forehead as the shot fired by Kâramanèh entered his high skull, had I
not known, so certainly as it is given to men to know, that the giant
intellect was no more, the mighty will impotent, I should have
replied:
"The message is from Dr. Fu Manchu!"
My reflections were rudely terminated and my sinister thoughts given
new stimulus, by a loud though muffled cry which reached me from
somewhere in the ship below. Both my companions started as violently
as I, whereby I knew that the mystery of the wireless message had not
been without its effect upon their minds also. But whereas they paused
in doubt, I leapt from the room and almost threw myself down the
ladder.
It was Kâramanèh who had uttered that cry of fear and horror!
Although I could perceive no connection betwixt the strange message
and the cry in the night, intuitively I linked them, intuitively I
knew that my fears had been well grounded; that the shadow of Fu
Manchu still lay upon us.
Kâramanèh occupied a large stateroom aft on the main deck; so that I
had to descend from the upper deck on which my own room was situated
to the promenade deck, again to the main deck, and thence proceed
nearly the whole length of the alleyway.
Kâramanèh and her brother, Azîz, who occupied a neighbouring room, met
me, near the library. Kâramanèh's eyes were wide with fear; her
peerless colouring had fled, and she was white to the lips. Azîz, who
wore a dressing-gown thrown hastily over his night attire, had his arm
protectively about the girl's shoulders.
"The mummy!" she whispered tremulously, "the mummy!"
There came a sound of opening doors, and several passengers, whom
Kâramanèh's cries had alarmed, appeared in various stages of undress.
A stewardess came running from the far end of the alleyway, and I
found time to wonder at my own speed; for, starting from the distant
Marconi deck, yet I had been the first to arrive upon the scene.
Stacey, the ship's doctor, was quartered at no great distance from the
spot, and he now joined the group. Anticipating the question which
trembled upon the lips of several of those about me--
"Come to Dr. Stacey's room," I said, taking Kâramanèh's arm; "we will
give you something to enable you to sleep." I turned to the group. "My
patient has had severe nerve trouble," I explained, "and has developed
somnambulistic tendencies."
I declined the stewardess's offer of assistance, with a slight shake
of the head, and shortly the four of us entered the doctor's cabin, on
the deck above. Stacey carefully closed the door. He was an old
fellow-student of mine, and already he knew much of the history of the
beautiful Eastern girl and her brother Azîz.
"I fear there's mischief afoot, Petrie," he said. "Thanks to your
presence of mind, the ship's gossips need know nothing of it."
I glanced at Kâramanèh, who, since the moment of my arrival, had never
once removed her gaze from me; she remained in that state of passive
fear in which I had found her, the lovely face pallid; and she stared
at me fixedly in a childish, expressionless way which made me dread
that the shock to which she had been subjected, whatever its nature,
had caused a relapse into that strange condition of forgetfulness from
which a previous shock had aroused her. I could see that Stacey shared
my view, for--
"Something has frightened you," he said gently, seating himself on the
arm of Kâramanèh's chair and patting her hand as if to reassure her.
"Tell us all about it."
For the first time since our meeting that night, the girl turned her
eyes from me and glanced up at Stacey, a sudden warm blush stealing
over her face and throat and as quickly departing, to leave her even
more pale than before. She grasped Stacey's hand in both her own--and
looked again at me.
"Send for Mr. Nayland Smith without delay!" she said, and her sweet
voice was slightly tremulous. "He must be put on his guard!"
I started up.
"Why?" I said. "For God's sake tell us what has happened!"
Azîz, who evidently was as anxious as myself for information, and who
now knelt at his sister's feet looking up at her with that strange
love, which was almost adoration, in his eyes, glanced back at me and
nodded his head rapidly.
"Something "--Kâramanèh paused, shuddering violently--"some dreadful
thing, like a mummy escaped from its tomb, came into my room to-night
through the port-hole...."
"Through the port-hole?" echoed Dr. Stacey amazedly.
"Yes, yes, through the port-hole! A creature tall and very, very thin.
He wore wrappings--yellow wrappings, swathed about his head, so that
only his eyes, his evil gleaming eyes, were visible.... From waist to
knees he was covered, also, but his body, his feet, and his legs were
bare...."
"Was he--?" I began.
"He was a brown man, yes." Kâramanèh, divining my question, nodded,
and the shimmering cloud of her wonderful hair, hastily confined,
burst free and rippled about her shoulders. "A gaunt, fleshless brown
man, who bent, and writhed bony fingers--so!"
"A thug!" I cried.
"He--it--the mummy thing--would have strangled me if I had slept, for
he crouched over the berth--seeking--seeking...."
I clenched my teeth convulsively.
"But I was sitting up--"
"With the light on?" interrupted Stacey in surprise.
"No," added Kâramanèh; "the light was out." She turned her eyes toward
me, as the wonderful blush overspread her face once more. "I was
sitting thinking. It all happened within a few seconds, and quite
silently. As the mummy crouched over the berth, I unlocked the door
and leapt out into the passage. I think I screamed; I did not mean to.
Oh, Dr. Stacey, there is not a moment to spare! Mr. Nayland Smith must
be warned immediately. Some horrible servant of Dr. Fu-Manchu is on
the ship!"